Gahan Wilson: Art for People Who Read Playboy for the Cartoons

A cartoon by Gahan Wilson: “The whole thing’s much smaller than it seemed on TV.”

For the last 50 years, Gahan Wilson has been one of the most influential shapers of Playboy Magazine–and his work doesn’t rely on naked women. The 79-year-old cartoonist’s art has appeared in every issue of Playboy from the December 1957 issue up to today. Wilson’s cartoons, known for their blend of the macabre and the sardonic, have drawn comparisons to cartoonists like Charles Addams. Playboy allowed Wilson’s work to flourish and he was often given large, full-color spots for his witty images. For the first time his entire catalog from Playboy has been collected in a three-part box set from Fantagraphics, “Gahan Wilson: 50 Years of Playboy Cartoons.” “In a magazine devoted to sex and aspirational lifestyle accoutrements, Gahan Wilson was about something else—a cockeyed, dangerously weird way of looking at the world,” writes author Neil Gaiman in the introduction. Speakeasy took some time to talk to the artist about his work, the evolution of his cartoons, and working for “Hef.”

Speakeasy: Where do you think the dark humor came from? Is perhaps that you’re a descendant of P.T. Barnum?

Gahan Wilson: I would like to think that. It may be well some kooky gene in me. I remember loving Halloween as a kid and the whole business of doing spooky stuff. Halloween was about the only holiday which was really a kid’s day. The adults had no control over it at all and the kids would go out and get these dime store costumes and go off and the parents would let us go off and do silly stuff and then we’d come back and my parents would say “What happened?”

As the political climate has shifted, how has that affected your work?

When I began doing funny stuff, there was a certain element of commentary about it. There’s a whole history of humor as commentary with Jonathan Swift and so on. I was mostly just having fun doing and doing what I could get away with. Then, there was that period when they started killing everybody in the 60s like MLK and the Kennedys. It made me very mad so I wanted to attack the foolishness and horror of what was going on.

The other thing that dawned on me was we were destroying the planet or at least we were destroying it as a feasible environment. There’s a little grandiosity in saying we’re destroying the earth — we’re just screwing it up so we can’t live. For one, that was hilarious that we’d be determined to continue and it keeps getting worse and worse. I confess to this little fantasy that some senator comes across one of my cartoons about the air being unbreathable and takes it to another senator and says “You know maybe we should do something about this.” I admit it’s a bit feckless.

Getty Images

Gahan Wilson has a new boxed set of his cartoons from Playboy magazine.

What was your first memory of meeting Hugh Hefner?

I turned up at this nice large brownstone on the north side of Chicago while I was visiting my parents and I said that I’d like to see the editor of Trump [Hefner’s satire magazine edited by MAD’s founder Harvey Kurtzman]. She looked at me with a confused expression and said Trump was in New York City. I was terribly embarrassed, but as I was backing up and this man came from behind to say that Hugh Hefner would like to see you. His name was Art Paul [Playboy’s first art director who designed the bunny logo]. This fellow led me up a small flight of steps and there was this man on a telephone He waved me to a chair and continued on the phone. “It’s wonderful article, well written but it won’t work out,” he said to this person on the other line. “You see the piece is anti-sin and we’re pro-sin.” Then, he hung up, took my hand and said “I’ve been waiting for you.”

What was he wearing?

He had a classy business shirt and no tie. The smoking jackets were a long way off. They moved from the brownstone to an office building. He set that one up so the top story was his apartment and every time I went there, he’d show me this revolving bed which was pretty cute. That was his quarters and directly below was the editorial office. There was a stairwell that would lead downstairs.

He was definitely a night person, so around noon, he’d appear at the head of the stairs and open his door in a trance-like state. Then you’d hear the shuffling of papers and as he approached each editor who’d come with armful of what he did. They each had whole packets and when he got through, that person would vanish. When I was watching this, this must have been what Napoleon was like.

About Speakeasy

Speakeasy is a blog covering media, entertainment, celebrity and the arts. The publication is produced by Barbara Chai and Jonathan Welsh with contributions from the Wall Street Journal staff and others. Write to us at speakeasy@wsj.com or follow us on Twitter at @WSJSpeakeasy or individually @barbarachai.